It began with the assumption that the conflict was private.
If you read or listened to the last skeleton, “Bahamian Conspiracy Theory,” you know where we are now: on the doorstep of the NAGB, a national institution.
This is not a detour — it’s a continuation.
And it only gets bigger from here.
Before we dive into the next episode, though, I feel the need to catch my breath.
Maybe you do too.
If you haven’t started the series, this is a good time to rev up your podcast app and jump in.
If you’ve been following from the beginning, I’m prepping a quick review of Skeletons One through Five — pulling out some of what you may have missed along the way.
This year I released the first five of the Seven Skeletons — stories about family, faith, erasure, and survival. These pieces were never easy to write, but they were necessary to tell.
There are still more chapters to come: two more skeletons, an outro, and some bonus content that should pull everything into focus.
Some things still need saying.
I’m grateful to everyone who has walked part of this road with me.
My full (2 hour!) interview with ExJW Analyzer aka Jonathan Leger is up on his YouTube channel. We get into growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness in The Bahamas, whether or not I’m the first public Bahamian apostate, and the NAGB controversy and of course, we talked about the Seven Skeletons, plus a ton more! Please check it out.
“I’ve done picked out the seven juiciest, most rancid skeletons in that walk-in closet and every week from now till I’m done I’m going to dissect a different one, bone by bone, and piece by piece”
MentalSlavery.com presents "Seven Skeletons" — a limited series art experience that includes essays, a podcast, paintings, poetry and videos.
It tells the story of a prominent family of Bahamian artists through the lens of their lifelong relationship with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Visit the Table of Skeletons page for the full ordered list.
Every body does like look at they shit. I don’t know why. I figure we does be admiring it. Turn round and stare watch it go down. Put it on your resume. Look what good work I do. I got my shit together.
We does think our shit is best. Only we can’t never smell it we does be too close.
When I was young used to call Mummy, “come Mummy look come see, I bumpee strong like lion!”
Sooner or later you find out no one into your shit but you.
I know them long time, them people is mine. The women they’re fine, as long as you stay in line. Ronnie Butler
If there wasn’t already a thing called reverse nepotism, then I would just have to invent it.
Family should beget favour, but in my case I get passed over for things that I actually qualify for. From a Jehovah’s Witness point-of-view, as a disfellowshipped former member and apostate, my family are commanded to shun me and so I must be excluded from their projects. The “Ting an’ Ting” documentary is the odd and singular exception where I want to be removed from something of theirs and they have decided to keep me in — but to keep me they had to cut out everything I said that went against their views.
When they have their family art shows, I am not invited to participate and I’m not there at the openings. I only exist as a loose thread on my father’s bio — that he has three children. I don’t even live in the country anymore, so ‘out of sight, out of mind’. The compound effect of these absences has led to the very common reaction — “I didn’t know that Eddie Minnis had a son”.
1.
The “Ting an’ Ting” documentary has a number of great examples of this “reverse nepotism” in action. One of which is “Der Real Ting,” a juke-box musical written by Nicolette Bethel and Patrice Francis, directed by Philip Burrows that premiered in 2018.
On the left: A scene from Der Real Ting musical as performed at Shakespeare in Paradise at the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts. On the right: Album cover from the original cast recording.
Now, I talked to my father about doing a play from his music while I was in grad school — in 2009. I even wrote my own treatment for this “Eddie Minnis Musical” in that year while I was working on my own play, “The Cabinet.”
I’m not trying to say that I’m some genius for having the thought, because let’s be honest, stringing his songs into a narrative is not a radical idea – it was even done by the late great Eric Minns from a far smaller catalogue of songs in 2015 with his “Island Boy” musical.
At one point my father brought up the musical’s rehearsal process to me. He had observed that a lot of the children of people who worked on his music in the 70s and 80s were involved in the making of this production. I could only roll my eyes and suck my teeth.
That I, his son, was a playwright who brought him the idea nearly a decade prior and was now cut out from the entire process never occurred to him as odd or as the knife in my ribs that I took it to be.
2.
At first glance the “Creations Grace” Minnis Family Retrospective, also featured in the documentary, and put on by the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (NAGB) in 2014 seems like more of the same reverse nepotism.
For one thing, it looked a lot like any of theshows that my family has put on recently, with the only difference being that it focused on past work instead of recent work. If you squinted, you noticed that there was also a son represented, but it was the son-in-law, Ritchie Eyma – who is an exemplary Jehovah’s Witness – and not me.
Catalogue from the 2014 “Creation’s Grace,” Minnis Family Retrospective.
Despite all these similarities to what happened before though, you will see that this retrospective was quite a different beast. For one thing it was put on by the NAGB — a national institution — not a Witness affiliate by any means. The idea of the show came from the great Stan Burnside, one of the seminal Bahamian artists who was chairman of the board at the time. He passed this mandate to Amanda Coulson, Bahamian art historian and critic with international reach who had recently returned home to take on the NAGB’s Director job. She then gave the assignment to chief curator, John Cox, another major Bahamian artist and my art professor while I was at COB.
If you look up and down the list of people involved in the project or at least those who got their name attached to the catalogue — the late greats Patty Glinton-Meicholas and Dr. Gail Saunders alongside cultural hero Pam Burnside — there is not a Jehovah’s Witness to be found, and yet the final product looks exactly as it would if it were put on by the Watchtower society itself.
Since a retrospective is “an exhibition … showing the development of the work of a particular artist over a period of time” you would expect an Eddie Minnis retrospective to showcase his visual art work through time – and even to have some examples of his cartooning and maybe even his musical practice. And this was the original idea that Stan Burnside had.
This concept was expanded upon by Coulson as we read in Burnside’s introduction:
In her wisdom she [Amanda Coulson] expanded the original idea of an Eddie Minnis retrospective to include his family members.
This is where expectations shift.
If the show became a family retrospective then wouldn’t you naturally expect that all of the family that are artists would be represented? And would that not also include me? You might say though that perhaps the powers at the NAGB did not consider me to be an artist and thought that I should not be included because of that. Well let’s continue Burnside’s quote:
[The retrospective] is certainly an incredible showcase of what is now a “Dynasty of Minnis” artists, which also includes the Minnis’ son, Ward.
This was my first of two mentions in the catalogue. The second is found in my father’s biography as penned by Coulson:
Eddie and Sherry have three children; daughters Nicole and Roshanne and a son Ward (who is also an artist and a writer).
Here we have both the chairman of the board of The Bahamian National Art Gallery and the professional curator of the exhibit and gallery Director, both aware of my existence and acknowledging that I’m also an artist.
But the plot thickens. The NAGB was not only aware of me and my art, at the time they owned three of my paintings! Most recently they brought some of them out of the National collection to display in 2023 and 2024 in an exhibition entitled “The Nation / The Imaginary”.
What’s even wilder, is that when it comes to Minnis family art, they ONLY own my pieces and some from my father. Yes, you heard that right. Neither of my sisters nor Ritchie have any work in the NAGB’s National Collection.
If that’s the case – how is it that mention of me does not appear anywhere else in “Creations Grace”? How is it that not a single canvas of mine, even the ones that the NAGB owned, didn’t make it through to the Gallery floor for the family retrospective? How is it possible that there is no mention of my other artistic output: my poems, my theatre work, my cultural criticism?
If, in her wisdom, Coulson expanded the scope of the exhibit to include my sisters and then even further to include my brother-in-law, what wisdom prevented her from adding me to that list? And further still, why is this decision not explained anywhere?
It boggles the mind to imagine that a national institution curated a show of this magnitude along religious grounds as if they were a branch office of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The evidence that we have though, is the finished product, which surely looks and quacks like a religious hit job.
What followed after the exhibition was a decade of silence — a quiet cover-up built on the hope that no one would notice, and that even if someone did, they wouldn’t say anything.
And guess what?
It worked.
Coming up next: “The Art of Erasure.” A conversation long overdue — and that no one wanted to have — about the NAGB, the Minnis story, and what went missing.
Leaving — or even questioning — the Jehovah’s Witnesses can feel isolating. To make that journey easier, I’ve put together a curated list of books, documentaries, support groups, and creators who help explain the reality behind the organization and offer tools for healing.
Whether you’re recovering yourself, supporting someone who is, trying to understand what this religion actually asks of its members, or simply hoping to better understand a loved one’s journey, these curated resources offer guidance, education, and community.
The public image of Jehovah’s Witnesses is that of a mildly annoying group that are, for the most part, harmless.
Detail of “Under the Umbrella,” a 2001 Eddie Minnis painting that shows the Jehovah’s Witnesses (likely including my sisters) engaged in their door-to-door ministry.
If you have been following the Seven Skeletons story thus far though, I hope that this is not your current view of the religion. You should now see that inflicting pain on their members and generating fractured families is just a basic part of how they operate.
You can multiply my story by millions. Wherever you find the Witnesses there is a trail of trauma – for those still inside, those that dare to leave and even for those that still believe with all their heart. No one in the Watchtower world remains unscathed.
Governments around the world are starting to see the threat that this religion poses and are asking questions. The Witnesses are therefore battling for their tax-exempt lives in Australia, France, Norway and the United Kingdom, among others. In response to legal challenges, they have moved things around doctrinally, always on a superficial level, just to stay ahead of the regulations.
Will the Bahamian media and the Bahamian government begin to do similar due diligence and examine Jehovah’s Witnesses more closely? This remains to be seen.
What is clear is that classifying the stories of former members, like the one I’m telling now, as internal family disputes, or as outliers, is grossly missing the point. The problems with Jehovah’s Witnesses are clear and systemic and won’t go away. Pretending that they are another branch of Christianity, instead of the high control cult that they are, isn’t going to help anyone.
1.
In the year 2025, Jehovah’s Witnesses are a religion in transition. They are reeling from their most recent and perhaps greatest prophetic failure. For more than a century their long held belief has been that the generation that saw the first world war would not die before the coming of Christ and the end of the world.
Watchtower cover from May 15th, 1984 proclaiming that the “generation” that saw 1914 would not die before the end of the world. This doctrine has since been “updated” a few times since then, the most recent being their “overlapping generations” teaching.
This belief – the one that I grew up with – was both their reason for being and the source of their evangelical urgency. What has happened instead is that the people who they promised would ‘never die’ are all gone. Now in the aftermath, they are scrambling in real time to hold their religion together using the doctrinal equivalent of spit and duct tape before the rest of the faithful realize what’s going on.
What happens to a doomsday cult when the doomis postponed far into the future?
We are about to find out.
The only certainty is that the religion’s leadership want to retain their power. While they have recently made, what by their standards are radical changes – things like letting men grow beards and women wear pants in the ministry – they have given up nothing in real terms.
The religion is still claiming divine direction, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. They are still demanding the total subservience of their membership, even if none of the ever changing direction makes sense. The reality of the rank and file member is that they are still expected to follow the leadership totally or be cast out and shunned.
In short, Jehovah’s Witnesses are evolving before our eyes — but will remain a cult.
Being a Jehovah’s Witness is like being stuck in the Matrix. It’s like living in George Orwell’s 1984. The mental fog is so thick that you could slash at it with a machete for days and get nowhere.
If you have friends or family in your life who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, trying to pressure them into listening to the Seven Skeletons podcast or reading the articles is probably not the way. The indoctrination of the Witnesses thrives on perceived persecution — they see it as fighting the devil himself and it ironically makes the chains tighter. Trying to forcibly open someone’s eyes will likely have the opposite of the intended effect.
There is debate amongst ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses on what is the best way to wake up someone who is deeply indoctrinated. My personal opinion is that the shutters can only be opened from the inside because even when people leave the religion, I have seen many cases where they keep carrying the Witness world view and doctrine with them. Deprogramming is hard and painful work and can take a lifetime.
So what can you do?
Read, watch and educate yourself. Information will inoculate you and help you understand the threat they pose. If you know someone who is just studying with Jehovah’s Witnesses this is a good time to invite them to go on youtube or google and just do some simple searches.
To this end I’ve prepared a page of resources on Mentalslavery.com that can provide you with a starting point. The internet has given ex-members an excellent platform for exposing this cult and there is an ever growing amount of information out there that can help.
If you have friends and family who are already locked in the religion’s grasp please be gentle, please be kind. Don’t push them too hard if they aren’t ready. For the most part, Witnesses are good people who were either born into the religion, like me, and had no choice, or they were recruited at a very vulnerable point in their lives.
We who can see Witness’ false promises for the con job they are, just can’t pretend anymore that everything is all right.
